The Kennedy Assassination 50 Years Later
By Paul Craig Roberts
Dissident Voice.org
November 22, 2013
November 22, 2013, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy.
The true story of JFK’s murder has never been officially admitted,
although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving
the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been
well established by years of research, such as that provided by
James W. Douglass in his book, JFK And The Unspeakable.
Ignore Douglass’ interest in the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and
Merton’s prediction and focus on the heavily documented research
that Douglass provides.
Or just turn to the contemporary films, taken by tourists watching
JFK’s motorcade that are available on YouTube, which show clearly
the Secret Service pulled from President Kennedy’s limo just prior
to his assassination, and the Zapruder film that shows the killing
shot to have come from President Kennedy’s right front, blowing off
the back of his head, not from the rear as postulated in the Warren
Commission Report, which would have pushed his head forward, not
rearward.
I am not going to write about the assassination to the extent that
the massive information permits.
Those who want to know already know.
Those who cannot face the music will never be able to confront the
facts regardless of what I or anyone else writes or reveals.
To briefly review, the facts are conclusive that JFK was on terrible
terms with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs.
He had refused to support the CIA organized Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba.
He had rejected the Joint Chiefs’ Operation Northwoods, a plan to
commit real and faked acts of violence against Americans, blame
Castro and use the false flag events to bring regime change to Cuba.
He had rejected the Joint Chiefs’ case that the Soviet Union should
be attacked while the US held the advantage and before the Soviets
could develop delivery systems for nuclear weapons.
He had indicated that after his reelection he was going to pull US
troops out of Vietnam and that he was going to break the CIA into
a thousand pieces.
He had aroused suspicion by working behind the scenes with
Khrushchev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to
claims that he was “soft on communism.”
The CIA and Joint Chiefs’ belief that JFK was an unreliable ally
in the war against communism spread into the Secret Service.
It has been established that the original autopsy of JFK’s fatal
head wound was discarded and a faked one substituted in order
to support the official story that Oswald shot JFK from behind.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson knew that
Oswald was the CIA’s patsy, but they also understood, as did
members of the Warren Commission, that to let the true story
out would cause Americans to lose confidence in their own
government at the height of the Cold War.
Robert Kennedy knew what had happened.
He was on his way to being elected president and to holding the
plotters accountable for the murder of his brother when the CIA
assassinated him.
A distinguished journalist, who was standing behind Robert Kennedy
at the time of his assassination, told me that the killing shots came
from behind past his ear.
He submitted his report to the FBI and was never contacted.
Acoustic experts have conclusively demonstrated that more shots
were fired than can be accounted for by Sirhan Sirhan’s pistol and
that the sounds indicate two different calibers of firearms.
I never cease to be amazed by the gullibility of Americans, who
know nothing about either event, but who confidently dismiss the
factual evidence provided by experts and historians on the basis
of their naive belief that “the government wouldn’t lie about such
important events” or “someone would have talked.”
What good would it do if someone talked when the gullible won’t
believe hard evidence?
Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist, author, columnist,
former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and former editor and
columnist for corporate media publications.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/11/the-kennedy-assassination-
november-22-1963-50-years-later
Friday, November 22, 2013
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
The Hero and The Villains
The Jeremy Hammond Sentence
By Alfred Lopez
Counter Punch
November 20, 2013
This past Friday, Internet activist Jeremy Hammond stood in
a federal courtroom and told Judge Loretta A. Preska why he
released a trove of emails and other information uncovering
the possibly illegal and certainly immoral collaboration of
a major surveillance corporation called Stratfor with our
government.
He also stressed what followers of his case already knew: that
his activities were encouraged, organized and facilitated by an
FBI informant turned operative.
In short, his partner in these “violations of United States law”
was the government of the United States.
He acknowledged that the Judge could sentence him to 10 years
in jail but he never apologized for his actions or questioned their
validity as political activism.
And, in a statement remarkable for his courage and political
principle (after 20 months in jail on this case), he established
himself as one of the heroes of the struggle over for freedom
and justice.
In a world in which people often seek to defend themselves in
court by questioning whether they did what they are accused
of, Hammond defended himself by saying that he did what they
said he did and more, and that he was right to do it.
“The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being
sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community
and equality that have guided my life,” he told the court.
“I hacked into dozens of high profile corporations and government
institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was
against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal
prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose
and confront injustice–and to bring the truth to light.”
Expecting justice from Judge Preska was probably a stretch.
She had previously refused to recuse herself from the trial after it
was learned that her husband was one of the targets of Hammond’s
Stratfor hacks.
But when she hit him with the maximum jail sentence, a decade,
and then churlishly hit him with three extra years of probation
upon release during which he can’t use encryption on the Internet,
which essential forbids him from living a modern life, she put
the exclamation point on the statement this case makes about our
government.
While conducting surveillance on all its citizens (and using drones
and agents and wars to trample on the human rights of people
world-wide), it also uses elaborate stings and agent strategies to
lure Internet activists into gathering information it wants but
can’t legally obtain and then puts them in jail to shut them up.
It is, without question, a chilling story.
At the age of 29, Hammond is already a seasoned, experienced
and “struggle-weathered” political activist.
He was an anti-war activist in High School at 18 when he launched
the legendary website HackThisSite [2], “a free, safe and legal
training ground for hackers to test and expand their hacking skills”
that remains one of the most popular and respected hacking
education on-line communities.
His history during the last decade is sprinkled with a series of
arrests during protests against the Iraq war, the trampling of
gay rights, the erosion of democratic rights and the disruptive
activities of extreme right-wing groups.
He’s been beaten and arrested on more than a half dozen occasions
for these actions.
In fact, in 2007, Hammond was imprisoned for hacking into
the website of the right-wing group Protest Warrior, known
for attacking anti-war demonstrations.
The hack captured all kinds of information and brought the website
down.
Some of that info included credit card numbers for contributors to
Protest Warrior and, although no card was ever used or charged to
as a result, the government charged Hammond with what amounts
to card theft and jailed him to two years.
When he was released he returned to protest but, he told the
court, “The Obama administration continued the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, escalated the use of drones, and failed to
close Guantanamo Bay.”
Believing more direct action was needed, he returned to hacking
and began targeting police departments and law enforcement
agencies “because of the racism and inequality with which
the criminal law is enforced” and hitting military and police
equipment manufacturers as well as surveillance and security
contractors.
Then he met Sabu.
Hector Xavier Monsegur (known on-line as Sabu) was the most
visible figure in LulzSec, a hacker collective known for several
high-profile hacks of of government and corporate sites.
Monsegur, who lived in the Jacob Riis Projects of New York’s
Lower East Side, had a reputation among activists as a prankster
who seemed to hack power sites more for enjoyment and rebellious
“rush” than for principled politics.
His statements and tweets were, in fact, never that political.
It’s safe to say that many on-line activists were wary of Sabu
and that was well-founded because Sabu was working for the
FBI.
As Assistant U.S. Attorney James Pastore said at a secret bail
hearing on Aug. 5, 2011 about a month after Sabu was arrested by
the FBI, “Since literally the day he was arrested, the defendant has
been cooperating with the government proactively.”
Sabu wasn’t just a snitch (although he appears to have given the FBI
every name, email and detail about hackers and activists he knew),
he was an active provocateur, using his LulzSec “cover” to ensnare
other Internet activists in criminal acts.
Using FBI servers, he coordinated hacker projects that would land
Internet activists, including almost the entire LulzSec collective,
in jail, the equivalent of committing crimes in the FBI’s offices.
He targeted dozens of other activists and even tried to involve
Nadim Kobeissi [3], the respected Canadian technologist and
author of the secure communication software Cryptocat, but
Kobeissi rebuffed those overtures and that ensnarement project
was dropped.
In December, 2011, Sabu hit the jackpot.
He obtained exploits (programs that allowed entrance into a server)
to the credit card database of Statfor, a security and surveillance
contractor that works for a literal who’s who of corporations.
Under FBI supervision, Sabu logged onto a private chatroom run by
the hacker collective AntiSec (of which Hammond was a member)
and began distributing links and passwords to Statfor’s servers.
Hammond got involved, spending a week attempting access
to Stratfor’s email systems and then loading the information
he and others gleaned onto servers owned and run by the FBI.
The resulting information, mostly released by Wikileaks, was
stunning.
The emails showed that Stratfor had spied on movements in other
countries, movements and organizations in the U.S. and individual
activists.
It targeted PETA, the political “prankster” organization the
YesMen and activists involved in the campaign against Dow
Chemical over the catastrophic Bhopal, India gas leaks.
It conducted, in cooperation with the government, a remarkable
campaign of intense surveillance and infiltration of the Occupy
movement.
“And,” as journalist Chris Hedges said in an interview with the Real
News Network [4], “we also found from those email exchanges that
there was a concerted attempt on the part of security officials both
inside the government and within the private security contracting
agency, to link, falsely, nonviolent dissident groups with terrorist
groups so that they could apply terrorism laws against these groups.”
According to his statement, after the Statfor hack, Hammond
continued using Sabu’s information to hack corporate sites and
several official government sites.
He also supplied Sabu and other hackers with information
similarly used.
“I don’t know how other information I provided to (Sabu) may
have been used,” Hammond says, “but I think the government’s
collection and use of this data needs to be investigated.”
Part of his statement, stricken by the Judge after Prosecution
objections but made available at the Pastebin site [5], reads
like a spy novel:
“Sabu also supplied lists of targets…At his request, these websites
were broken into, their emails and databases were uploaded to
Sabu’s FBI server, and the password information and the location
of root backdoors were supplied. These intrusions took place in January/February of 2012 and affected over 2000 domains,
including numerous foreign government websites in Brazil, Turkey,
Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia, Greece,
Pakistan, and others. A few of the compromised websites that I
recollect include the official website of the Governor of Puerto
Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of Brazil,
the Official Website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax
Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education
and Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the
Ministry of Electricity of Iraq.”
According to Hammond, Sabu also infiltrated a group of hackers
that had access to hundreds of Syrian systems including government
institutions, banks, and ISPs.
“The FBI took advantage of hackers who wanted to help support the
Syrian people against the Assad regime, who instead unwittingly
provided the U.S. government access to Syrian systems undoubtedly
supplying useful intelligence to the military and their buildup for
war.”
“All of this happened under the control and supervision of the FBI.”
he adds.
“…However, the full extent of the FBI’s abuses remains hidden.
Because I pled guilty, I do not have access to many documents
that might have been provided to me in advance of trial, such
as Sabu’s communications with the FBI. In addition, the majority
of the documents provided to me are under a ‘protective order’
which insulates this material from public scrutiny…I believe the
documents will show that the government’s actions go way beyond
catching hackers and stopping computer crimes.”
Sometimes the stunning nature of a story actually blinds us to its
real meaning and this may be one such case.
What shines here is, of course, that the U.S. government engaged
in criminal behavior.
One of its agents facilitated Hammond’s “crime” by giving
him necessary information, then encouraging him to use it
and supporting him as he did.
The government itself helped Hammond load the huge amount
of information by giving him access to government servers.
The FBI then encouraged and facilitated Hammond’s continued
hackactivism against many other sites including those of other
governments, there’s no way of telling how much information
on other governments it ended up with but, given recent NSA
surveillance revelations, nothing would surprise.
If you did what the government did, you would be in jail.
After doing what it did, the government is throwing someone
else in jail.
But the more important issue is why.
It’s clear that the U.S. government was using Hammond and other
progressive activists to spy and gather data on other governments
world-wide.
Coupled with recent revelations about the NSA’ Muscular and
Prism programs, these facts paint a picture of a government
that conducts surveillance on the world through the Internet
circumventing the normal channels of law and courts that are
built to restrict this kind of activity.
While information providers like Chelsea Manning and Edward
Snowden have demonstrated how the government uses information
technology to spy on the world (and its own citizens), Hammond’s
revelations show that it uses Internet activists to do the same and
then, to shut them up, punishes them for doing it.
What’s more, Hammond’s case exposes the almost non-existent
lines between intelligence agencies of this government and the
network of contractors it hires to do some of its work.
While the government can be slapped for ignoring the laws of
privacy that it has consistently violated, these companies are
immune to such criticism because they don’t operate under those
laws.
Finally, though, it’s not what Hammond did but what he is and
what he represents.
Other well-known whistle-blowers are often people working for
governments or involved in Internet data work who suddenly see
the sins of the United States’ immoral and destruction policies,
and then act on those light-bulb moments.
But Jeremy Hammond is an activist first and foremost, a person
whose activities have been as much “on the streets” as in front
of a computer.
In that sense, he is much more representative of the Internet
activists who serve the progressive movement of this country and
others throughout the world: people who believe in democracy and
justice and then use their computer skills as a logical extension of
those beliefs.
To a repressive government likes ours involved in a frenzied search
for a way to maintain its control over a decaying and dismantling
system, they are the greater danger.
Whether through hack work like Hammond’s or through the
facilitating of movement communications and organizing on-
line, these are the people who manage, design and protect the
tools of movement communication.
Jeremy Hammond’s arrest and conviction appear to be a chilling
message to us but the most powerful message is the warming one
he gave us in his court statement.
“I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when
will the government be made to answer for its crimes?” he told
the court. “The U.S. hypes the threat of hackers in order to
justify the multi billion dollar cyber security industrial complex,
but it is also responsible for the same conduct it aggressively
prosecutes and claims to work to prevent. The hypocrisy of ‘law
and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured
by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct
action. Yes I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must
be broken in order to make room for change.”
A person who makes that statement facing ten years in jail is a “hero”…without qualification.
Alfredo Lopez writes about technology issues for This Can’t Be
Happening!
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/18/the-hero-and-the-
villains-the-jeremy-hammond-sentence
By Alfred Lopez
Counter Punch
November 20, 2013
This past Friday, Internet activist Jeremy Hammond stood in
a federal courtroom and told Judge Loretta A. Preska why he
released a trove of emails and other information uncovering
the possibly illegal and certainly immoral collaboration of
a major surveillance corporation called Stratfor with our
government.
He also stressed what followers of his case already knew: that
his activities were encouraged, organized and facilitated by an
FBI informant turned operative.
In short, his partner in these “violations of United States law”
was the government of the United States.
He acknowledged that the Judge could sentence him to 10 years
in jail but he never apologized for his actions or questioned their
validity as political activism.
And, in a statement remarkable for his courage and political
principle (after 20 months in jail on this case), he established
himself as one of the heroes of the struggle over for freedom
and justice.
In a world in which people often seek to defend themselves in
court by questioning whether they did what they are accused
of, Hammond defended himself by saying that he did what they
said he did and more, and that he was right to do it.
“The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being
sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community
and equality that have guided my life,” he told the court.
“I hacked into dozens of high profile corporations and government
institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was
against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal
prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose
and confront injustice–and to bring the truth to light.”
Expecting justice from Judge Preska was probably a stretch.
She had previously refused to recuse herself from the trial after it
was learned that her husband was one of the targets of Hammond’s
Stratfor hacks.
But when she hit him with the maximum jail sentence, a decade,
and then churlishly hit him with three extra years of probation
upon release during which he can’t use encryption on the Internet,
which essential forbids him from living a modern life, she put
the exclamation point on the statement this case makes about our
government.
While conducting surveillance on all its citizens (and using drones
and agents and wars to trample on the human rights of people
world-wide), it also uses elaborate stings and agent strategies to
lure Internet activists into gathering information it wants but
can’t legally obtain and then puts them in jail to shut them up.
It is, without question, a chilling story.
At the age of 29, Hammond is already a seasoned, experienced
and “struggle-weathered” political activist.
He was an anti-war activist in High School at 18 when he launched
the legendary website HackThisSite [2], “a free, safe and legal
training ground for hackers to test and expand their hacking skills”
that remains one of the most popular and respected hacking
education on-line communities.
His history during the last decade is sprinkled with a series of
arrests during protests against the Iraq war, the trampling of
gay rights, the erosion of democratic rights and the disruptive
activities of extreme right-wing groups.
He’s been beaten and arrested on more than a half dozen occasions
for these actions.
In fact, in 2007, Hammond was imprisoned for hacking into
the website of the right-wing group Protest Warrior, known
for attacking anti-war demonstrations.
The hack captured all kinds of information and brought the website
down.
Some of that info included credit card numbers for contributors to
Protest Warrior and, although no card was ever used or charged to
as a result, the government charged Hammond with what amounts
to card theft and jailed him to two years.
When he was released he returned to protest but, he told the
court, “The Obama administration continued the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, escalated the use of drones, and failed to
close Guantanamo Bay.”
Believing more direct action was needed, he returned to hacking
and began targeting police departments and law enforcement
agencies “because of the racism and inequality with which
the criminal law is enforced” and hitting military and police
equipment manufacturers as well as surveillance and security
contractors.
Then he met Sabu.
Hector Xavier Monsegur (known on-line as Sabu) was the most
visible figure in LulzSec, a hacker collective known for several
high-profile hacks of of government and corporate sites.
Monsegur, who lived in the Jacob Riis Projects of New York’s
Lower East Side, had a reputation among activists as a prankster
who seemed to hack power sites more for enjoyment and rebellious
“rush” than for principled politics.
His statements and tweets were, in fact, never that political.
It’s safe to say that many on-line activists were wary of Sabu
and that was well-founded because Sabu was working for the
FBI.
As Assistant U.S. Attorney James Pastore said at a secret bail
hearing on Aug. 5, 2011 about a month after Sabu was arrested by
the FBI, “Since literally the day he was arrested, the defendant has
been cooperating with the government proactively.”
Sabu wasn’t just a snitch (although he appears to have given the FBI
every name, email and detail about hackers and activists he knew),
he was an active provocateur, using his LulzSec “cover” to ensnare
other Internet activists in criminal acts.
Using FBI servers, he coordinated hacker projects that would land
Internet activists, including almost the entire LulzSec collective,
in jail, the equivalent of committing crimes in the FBI’s offices.
He targeted dozens of other activists and even tried to involve
Nadim Kobeissi [3], the respected Canadian technologist and
author of the secure communication software Cryptocat, but
Kobeissi rebuffed those overtures and that ensnarement project
was dropped.
In December, 2011, Sabu hit the jackpot.
He obtained exploits (programs that allowed entrance into a server)
to the credit card database of Statfor, a security and surveillance
contractor that works for a literal who’s who of corporations.
Under FBI supervision, Sabu logged onto a private chatroom run by
the hacker collective AntiSec (of which Hammond was a member)
and began distributing links and passwords to Statfor’s servers.
Hammond got involved, spending a week attempting access
to Stratfor’s email systems and then loading the information
he and others gleaned onto servers owned and run by the FBI.
The resulting information, mostly released by Wikileaks, was
stunning.
The emails showed that Stratfor had spied on movements in other
countries, movements and organizations in the U.S. and individual
activists.
It targeted PETA, the political “prankster” organization the
YesMen and activists involved in the campaign against Dow
Chemical over the catastrophic Bhopal, India gas leaks.
It conducted, in cooperation with the government, a remarkable
campaign of intense surveillance and infiltration of the Occupy
movement.
“And,” as journalist Chris Hedges said in an interview with the Real
News Network [4], “we also found from those email exchanges that
there was a concerted attempt on the part of security officials both
inside the government and within the private security contracting
agency, to link, falsely, nonviolent dissident groups with terrorist
groups so that they could apply terrorism laws against these groups.”
According to his statement, after the Statfor hack, Hammond
continued using Sabu’s information to hack corporate sites and
several official government sites.
He also supplied Sabu and other hackers with information
similarly used.
“I don’t know how other information I provided to (Sabu) may
have been used,” Hammond says, “but I think the government’s
collection and use of this data needs to be investigated.”
Part of his statement, stricken by the Judge after Prosecution
objections but made available at the Pastebin site [5], reads
like a spy novel:
“Sabu also supplied lists of targets…At his request, these websites
were broken into, their emails and databases were uploaded to
Sabu’s FBI server, and the password information and the location
of root backdoors were supplied. These intrusions took place in January/February of 2012 and affected over 2000 domains,
including numerous foreign government websites in Brazil, Turkey,
Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia, Greece,
Pakistan, and others. A few of the compromised websites that I
recollect include the official website of the Governor of Puerto
Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of Brazil,
the Official Website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax
Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education
and Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the
Ministry of Electricity of Iraq.”
According to Hammond, Sabu also infiltrated a group of hackers
that had access to hundreds of Syrian systems including government
institutions, banks, and ISPs.
“The FBI took advantage of hackers who wanted to help support the
Syrian people against the Assad regime, who instead unwittingly
provided the U.S. government access to Syrian systems undoubtedly
supplying useful intelligence to the military and their buildup for
war.”
“All of this happened under the control and supervision of the FBI.”
he adds.
“…However, the full extent of the FBI’s abuses remains hidden.
Because I pled guilty, I do not have access to many documents
that might have been provided to me in advance of trial, such
as Sabu’s communications with the FBI. In addition, the majority
of the documents provided to me are under a ‘protective order’
which insulates this material from public scrutiny…I believe the
documents will show that the government’s actions go way beyond
catching hackers and stopping computer crimes.”
Sometimes the stunning nature of a story actually blinds us to its
real meaning and this may be one such case.
What shines here is, of course, that the U.S. government engaged
in criminal behavior.
One of its agents facilitated Hammond’s “crime” by giving
him necessary information, then encouraging him to use it
and supporting him as he did.
The government itself helped Hammond load the huge amount
of information by giving him access to government servers.
The FBI then encouraged and facilitated Hammond’s continued
hackactivism against many other sites including those of other
governments, there’s no way of telling how much information
on other governments it ended up with but, given recent NSA
surveillance revelations, nothing would surprise.
If you did what the government did, you would be in jail.
After doing what it did, the government is throwing someone
else in jail.
But the more important issue is why.
It’s clear that the U.S. government was using Hammond and other
progressive activists to spy and gather data on other governments
world-wide.
Coupled with recent revelations about the NSA’ Muscular and
Prism programs, these facts paint a picture of a government
that conducts surveillance on the world through the Internet
circumventing the normal channels of law and courts that are
built to restrict this kind of activity.
While information providers like Chelsea Manning and Edward
Snowden have demonstrated how the government uses information
technology to spy on the world (and its own citizens), Hammond’s
revelations show that it uses Internet activists to do the same and
then, to shut them up, punishes them for doing it.
What’s more, Hammond’s case exposes the almost non-existent
lines between intelligence agencies of this government and the
network of contractors it hires to do some of its work.
While the government can be slapped for ignoring the laws of
privacy that it has consistently violated, these companies are
immune to such criticism because they don’t operate under those
laws.
Finally, though, it’s not what Hammond did but what he is and
what he represents.
Other well-known whistle-blowers are often people working for
governments or involved in Internet data work who suddenly see
the sins of the United States’ immoral and destruction policies,
and then act on those light-bulb moments.
But Jeremy Hammond is an activist first and foremost, a person
whose activities have been as much “on the streets” as in front
of a computer.
In that sense, he is much more representative of the Internet
activists who serve the progressive movement of this country and
others throughout the world: people who believe in democracy and
justice and then use their computer skills as a logical extension of
those beliefs.
To a repressive government likes ours involved in a frenzied search
for a way to maintain its control over a decaying and dismantling
system, they are the greater danger.
Whether through hack work like Hammond’s or through the
facilitating of movement communications and organizing on-
line, these are the people who manage, design and protect the
tools of movement communication.
Jeremy Hammond’s arrest and conviction appear to be a chilling
message to us but the most powerful message is the warming one
he gave us in his court statement.
“I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when
will the government be made to answer for its crimes?” he told
the court. “The U.S. hypes the threat of hackers in order to
justify the multi billion dollar cyber security industrial complex,
but it is also responsible for the same conduct it aggressively
prosecutes and claims to work to prevent. The hypocrisy of ‘law
and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured
by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct
action. Yes I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must
be broken in order to make room for change.”
A person who makes that statement facing ten years in jail is a “hero”…without qualification.
Alfredo Lopez writes about technology issues for This Can’t Be
Happening!
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/18/the-hero-and-the-
villains-the-jeremy-hammond-sentence
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
The Money Monopoly
The Money Monopoly
By Mike Krauss
OpEdNews.com
November 19, 2013
In a masterful study of the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple,
William Greider observed that the average American farmer in 1880
knew more about banking and money than most U.S. college graduates today.
Let me prove that.
Take a bill from your wallet or purse. Read the side with the
portrait.
It says very clearly at the top, "Federal Reserve Note."
The Federal Reserve is not a part of the federal government.
It receives no appropriation from Congress.
It is a private corporation and its stock is privately traded.
The stockholders are the member banks of the regional Federal
Reserve Banks, so its major stockholders are the largest banks
and their owners.
Historically these have been the powerful Wall Street and European
banking families: think Rothschild, Warburg, Morgan, Rockefeller.
All the bills and coins in circulation today are a tiny fraction of the
supply of money in the American economy.
All the rest is credit, created on the books of the banks "ex nilo" --
out of nothing.
This money comes into circulation at interest paid to the banks
that create it.
A central bank like the Federal Reserve creates the money supply
of the United States, at interest.
The Bank of England was the first privately owned central bank to
control a nation's currency.
One of its owners, of the Rothschild family well understood what
that meant and said: "Give me control of a nation's money, and
I care not who makes the laws."
Big money.
The colony of Pennsylvania escaped the clutches of the Bank of
England and its tax on money by printing its own.
It was pure genius.
Writing in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith noted:
"The government of Pennsylvania, without amassing any treasure
[gold or silver] invented a method of lending, not money indeed,
but what is equivalent to money. By advancing to private people
at interest " paper bills of credit " legal tender in all payments "
it raised a moderate revenue which went a considerable distance
toward defraying the whole ordinary expense of that frugal and
orderly government."
Until the mid 1750s there was broad prosperity in Pennsylvania.
On a trip to London, Ben Franklin let the cat out of the bag.
He noted the widespread poverty he saw there and explained how
by printing their own money and avoiding the need for the notes
of the Bank of England to conduct their commerce, the people of
Pennsylvania insured their own prosperity.
The private owners of the Bank of England went the 1700s version
of ballistic and lobbied the King and Parliament (Sound familiar?)
to outlaw this colonial "script."
The depression that followed was the cause of the American
Revolution.
Franklin wrote, "In one year the conditions were so reversed that
the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an
extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed."
He concluded, "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax
on tea and other matters, had it not been the poverty caused by
the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament
[Again, sound familiar?]: which has caused in the Colonies hatred
of England, and the Revolutionary War."
The bankers got control.
Hamilton fronted for them in the young United States.
Jefferson and Jackson fought them.
Lincoln fought them.
Lincoln was assassinated, the bankers once again had control and
the war for control of the nation's supply of money raged on.
After decades of planning and massive PR and propaganda, having
bought up the support of Ivy League scholars, journalists and the
requisite number of votes in Congress, the Wall Street cartel and
their foreign allies pushed creation of the Federal Reserve through
Congress and got complete control of the nation's money and credit.
Before you pay your taxes, the money you pay with has already
been taxed by the owners of the Federal Reserve, which for over
100 years have diverted trillions of dollars of interest payments
on our money from the American people into their own pockets.
That is what "central banks" are designed to do: extract wealth
from nations by monopolizing the supply and cost of money and
credit.
The debt ceiling, sequestration, austerity and budget deficit are
a diversion.
The U.S. Congress can slash the debt by taking back control of our
money from the Federal Reserve monopoly and returning it to the
U.S. Treasury and the American people, as the Constitution (Article
I, Section 8) wisely provided.
Mike Krauss is a Director of the Public Banking Institute,
Chairman of the Pennsylvania Project, and Author of the
forthcoming novel, "Pursuits of Happiness."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Money-Monopoly-by-Mike-
Krauss-Bankers_Bankers_Banks_Credit-131119-816.html
By Mike Krauss
OpEdNews.com
November 19, 2013
In a masterful study of the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple,
William Greider observed that the average American farmer in 1880
knew more about banking and money than most U.S. college graduates today.
Let me prove that.
Take a bill from your wallet or purse. Read the side with the
portrait.
It says very clearly at the top, "Federal Reserve Note."
The Federal Reserve is not a part of the federal government.
It receives no appropriation from Congress.
It is a private corporation and its stock is privately traded.
The stockholders are the member banks of the regional Federal
Reserve Banks, so its major stockholders are the largest banks
and their owners.
Historically these have been the powerful Wall Street and European
banking families: think Rothschild, Warburg, Morgan, Rockefeller.
All the bills and coins in circulation today are a tiny fraction of the
supply of money in the American economy.
All the rest is credit, created on the books of the banks "ex nilo" --
out of nothing.
This money comes into circulation at interest paid to the banks
that create it.
A central bank like the Federal Reserve creates the money supply
of the United States, at interest.
The Bank of England was the first privately owned central bank to
control a nation's currency.
One of its owners, of the Rothschild family well understood what
that meant and said: "Give me control of a nation's money, and
I care not who makes the laws."
Big money.
The colony of Pennsylvania escaped the clutches of the Bank of
England and its tax on money by printing its own.
It was pure genius.
Writing in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith noted:
"The government of Pennsylvania, without amassing any treasure
[gold or silver] invented a method of lending, not money indeed,
but what is equivalent to money. By advancing to private people
at interest " paper bills of credit " legal tender in all payments "
it raised a moderate revenue which went a considerable distance
toward defraying the whole ordinary expense of that frugal and
orderly government."
Until the mid 1750s there was broad prosperity in Pennsylvania.
On a trip to London, Ben Franklin let the cat out of the bag.
He noted the widespread poverty he saw there and explained how
by printing their own money and avoiding the need for the notes
of the Bank of England to conduct their commerce, the people of
Pennsylvania insured their own prosperity.
The private owners of the Bank of England went the 1700s version
of ballistic and lobbied the King and Parliament (Sound familiar?)
to outlaw this colonial "script."
The depression that followed was the cause of the American
Revolution.
Franklin wrote, "In one year the conditions were so reversed that
the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an
extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed."
He concluded, "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax
on tea and other matters, had it not been the poverty caused by
the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament
[Again, sound familiar?]: which has caused in the Colonies hatred
of England, and the Revolutionary War."
The bankers got control.
Hamilton fronted for them in the young United States.
Jefferson and Jackson fought them.
Lincoln fought them.
Lincoln was assassinated, the bankers once again had control and
the war for control of the nation's supply of money raged on.
After decades of planning and massive PR and propaganda, having
bought up the support of Ivy League scholars, journalists and the
requisite number of votes in Congress, the Wall Street cartel and
their foreign allies pushed creation of the Federal Reserve through
Congress and got complete control of the nation's money and credit.
Before you pay your taxes, the money you pay with has already
been taxed by the owners of the Federal Reserve, which for over
100 years have diverted trillions of dollars of interest payments
on our money from the American people into their own pockets.
That is what "central banks" are designed to do: extract wealth
from nations by monopolizing the supply and cost of money and
credit.
The debt ceiling, sequestration, austerity and budget deficit are
a diversion.
The U.S. Congress can slash the debt by taking back control of our
money from the Federal Reserve monopoly and returning it to the
U.S. Treasury and the American people, as the Constitution (Article
I, Section 8) wisely provided.
Mike Krauss is a Director of the Public Banking Institute,
Chairman of the Pennsylvania Project, and Author of the
forthcoming novel, "Pursuits of Happiness."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Money-Monopoly-by-Mike-
Krauss-Bankers_Bankers_Banks_Credit-131119-816.html
Sunday, November 17, 2013
The Ends of Capitalism
The Ends of Capitalism
By Rob Urie
Counter Punch
November 17, 2013
In the midst of the unfolding economic and financial catastrophes
of 2009 Barack Obama, the new President of the U.S., entered
office with the broad political support needed to lead the
country away from the war, militarism, and economic pillage of
the George W. Bush years.
The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had left those countries
in ruins with over a million Iraqis killed and four or more million
displaced.
In contrast to the outcomes imagined in the deluded hubris of
neo-con ‘think tanks,’ these wars demonstrated both the limits
of American military power as means of geopolitical suasion and
the absolute moral bankruptcy of America’s ‘leadership’ class
from the Bush/Cheney ‘team’ all the way down to the local flag
merchants.
The economic calamity underway was the broadest and deepest
since the Great Depression and shared that human-economic
catastrophe’s genesis in runaway finance and its result in a
socially untenable and politically incapacitating divide between
rich and poor.
The ‘world’ Mr. Obama inherited wasn’t ‘working’ for large
majorities in the West.
The level of employment of the working age population had
begun declining in 2000 and it had fallen off of the proverbial
cliff by late 2008.
The illusion of prosperity in some evidence in the mid-2000s
courtesy of the monetization of the preponderance of U.S.
housing equity, the collective savings of home ‘owners,’ to
fund purchases of wide screen televisions, 3rd, 4th, and 5th
automobiles, and new porch furniture, had shown its
foundations in mass delusion.
On Wall Street the gig was up, the financial ‘system’ was in full
collapse from the weight of its own ‘bounty’ and only had left its
brethren in financial ‘innovation’ to plunder.
The economic ‘efficiencies’ of thirty years of pirate capitalism
had shown themselves in the pockets and bank accounts of
America’s few hundred richest families and in its residual,
the smoldering ruins of an economy that had once made things,
for better and/or for worse, as well as in the emergent ‘micro’
economy of the formerly employed trading piece work and stock
tips on the Internet to keep the foreclosure wolves at bay.
In theory and in human capacity Mr. Obama had ‘options’ outside
dedicated restoration of the system of political economy that had
been so recently repudiated through his very own election and
through its own emergent facts.
Mr. Obama’s artifacts of American social ontology, ‘black,’
‘liberal,’ ‘thoughtful,’ were/are in theorized opposition
to the beloved/reviled baby Bush whose ‘aw shucks’ isms
were/are the coded populism of the business class in Atlanta,
Houston and of the rapidly expanding sputtering pissed right.
Rendered invisible in the public politicking was that Messrs.
Obama and Bush went to the same schools, ate at the same
restaurants with the same corporate representatives and
saw/see their interests as deeply tied to the existing order.
To the extent human agency ‘is,’ history will deal with each
man for the social space they occupied.
And that social space includes embodying the ‘hopes and
aspirations,’ however implausibly, of the people they only
encounter in passing on their way to or from meetings, lunches,
golf outings with their ‘peers’ whose competence at traversing
the social divide for long enough to bring back the bounty has
been demonstrated.
For those to whom this ‘embodiment’ is important, its motorcade
just drove past you on its way to a bankers convention in Geneva,
a United War Profiteers of America ski outing in Jackson Hole or
the annual Drone Murder and Torture shindig in San Diego.
However, and with apologies in advance for being the bearer of bad
news, as metaphor the ‘rollout,’ such as the term is operationally
applicable, of Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act is rough measure of
where you stand in the order of things.
In clear contrast, no systems other than the one that mattered
capitalism, crashed in 2009.
According to the income distribution data the restoration of banker
bonuses, executive pay, and the gaping chasm between the
beneficiaries of ‘free-market’ corporate welfare and its victims,
went off without a hitch.
There were no reports of J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon or
Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein having trouble logging on
to savethebankers.gov.
No doubt it is easier to transfer a few trillion dollars to a few
hundred families than it is to support and maintain the most
radically dysfunctional health care system in the ‘developed’
world, but don’t they teach technocratic competence at Harvard?
While all this is now just so much water over the windmill or
some such, the system that crashed in 1990, 2000 and again
in 2008 is still the one ‘we’ have.
And its reach into the world that we, the ‘driven by,’ live in
increases with every passing calamity
There was speculation when Mr. Obama appointed the primary
Clinton administration architects of the 2008 financial economic
catastrophe, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, to key
positions in his administration that he was doing so because
they knew ‘where the bodies were buried.’
Left unconsidered was that the practical, actual, factual effect
of the then unfolding calamity on the ‘people who matter’ was
their being forced to listen to annoying talking points on cable
business shows and having to forego a few moments of moving
and shaking to transfer their financial ‘assets’ of ill repute onto
the public accounts.
It wasn’t that different paths forward were considered and
decided against; they never entered the decision making
process.
There are points of dispute here, enthusiastic ‘debate’ was
reportedly held inside the Obama administration around the
questions: should Citibank and Bank of America be ‘nationalized,’
should Wall Street be ‘reined in’ through re-regulation and most
fundamentally, should the ‘stimulus package’ have been larger.
Of relevance is that the institutional prerogative of the politically
‘feasible’ was the unifying characteristic of all of these ‘debate’
resolutions.
But to be clear, this realm that of the politically feasible, is
utterly unrelated to the circumstance of the ‘driven by’ it is
coded reference to the politically, economically embedded,
in no way to be confused with the ‘hopes and aspirations’
‘embodied.’
The saying is that Mr. Obama inherited difficult circumstances
when he came into office.
But what he inherited was a particular stage in an historical
trajectory, one of what are regularly recurring crises in the
ascendance of global capitalism.
Within this trajectory catastrophes such as that of 2009 are
as much a part of political economy as the times of ‘prosperity.’
The view from the ‘inside’ from Washington and Wall Street,
averages prosperity with catastrophe to come to an ‘average’
conclusion about the political-economic viability of this capitalism.
Mr. Obama, or any other successful politician within the modern
understanding of success, ‘embodies’ the hopes and aspirations
of ‘average’ Americans in the same way that the average of
catastrophe and prosperity reach them in their lives.
Mr. Bush before him embodied the hopes and dreams of ‘long
suffering’ war mongering white, Christian Pentecostals and Mr.
Obama has his liberal progressive constituency, the average of
the two which form different ‘sides’ of an outside, the ‘driven
by.’
This isn’t to discount the difference, but rather to ask: who
exactly is making bank on it?
As circumscribed by those whose fortunes have been restored
since Mr. Obama took office, the difference that matters
remains between the embedded and the embodied, between
those whose fortunes are foregone conclusions and those who
wave as the motorcade passes.
The passions that surround Western political economy are
reactive for a reason.
Mr. Obama was assumed to represent antithesis because history
called for it.
The unmitigated disaster of the (baby) Bush years was evident to
even the dullest of his supporters as the incontrovertible ‘proof’
of calamity, falling stock prices, was underway.
But ‘change’ holds forth no promised direction. And more
fundamentally, from what possible logic would true antithesis
spring?
Within the static anti-historicism of capitalism antithesis always
and everywhere exists in the ‘driven by,’ in the ‘failure’ needed
to demonstrate the truth determining power of ‘success’ through
wealth and profits.
Restoration of the fortunes of the already rich was restoration
of this static antithesis, the only one visible to Mr. Obama’s
classmates.
The problem of re-thinking capitalism, not that anyone in the
recent history has tried, is that within its logic no catastrophe
is effective repudiation and outside of it either the whole project
goes into the garbage heap or none of it does.
A real catastrophe confronted the peoples of the West as
Mr. Obama entered office.
But the difference between having a billion dollars in the bank or
‘only’ five hundred million dollars was the problem that confronted
the people who brought Mr. Obama into office.
That problem calls for a different set of solutions than being cold,
hungry and unemployed.
And that is the problem Mr. Obama set about fixing.
Western economists view the sequential crises of 1990, 2000 and
2008 as unrelated events to be ‘solved’ through reactive responses,
through Keynesian stimulus or with ‘more’ capitalism.
However, within each subsequent economic ‘recovery’
the political economy of catastrophe grows.
The evidence of social dysfunction, radically skewed income
distribution, the increasingly sharp divide between those on
the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of political economy, political
incapacitation and a collective inability to solve even the
most basic social problems, is but the detritus of the thread
that carries these crises through ‘normal’ times.
In the terms of those moving comfortably along in the motorcade
there are ‘recessions’ and ‘recoveries,’ life’s facts whose average
may impact ‘the people’ differently, but only through the secular
god of capitalism’s discriminating hands.
The ‘driven by’ wave to themselves, to their ‘embodiment’ that
‘could have been them’ under some alternate order of the universe.
If ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are their own ‘proof’ of the efficacy of
capitalism as god’s hand in human affairs then so is its attendant
social dysfunction, if the rich are busy ‘making money’ and the
poor are their own ‘proof’ of their inability to be ‘successful’
then what conceivably could be the point of political reconciliation?
In choosing to ‘save’ the ‘system’ he so willingly entered, Mr.
Obama, like those before him, chose the sides inherent in that
system.
The government money used under Mr. Obama’s direction to buy
Wall Street’s garbage ‘assets’ was/is unified in its ‘moneyness’ with
that needed to salve the lot of the ‘driven by,’ those dispossessed
by birth, race, gender or more general circumstance, economic
class.
To paraphrase the cliché, ‘if you teach a man to borrow he eats
for a day, if you give the bank the money to lend to the man he
eats for a day and repays the borrowed money for a lifetime.’
Alternatively, and following from that theoretician of ‘system’
John Maynard Keynes, if you give people the money they need
to eat and live indoors they spend it and the system of
capitalism survives.
Given the choice, banks or their ‘customers,’ what system exactly,
precisely was it that Mr. Obama saved by choosing the banks?
In either case the system of capitalism would be ‘saved.’
To pretend for a moment that the question hasn’t already been
answered, why choose bankers, the ‘embedded,’ over ‘the people,’
those whose hopes and aspirations Messrs. Bush and Obama so
readily ‘embodied?’
The system to be so regularly saved is that of the perfectly ordered
universe, every man, woman and child in his or her God determined
‘place.’
How does one know their proper place?
Which side of the motorcade are you on?
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York. His book "Zen Economics" will be published by CounterPunch / AK Press in
Spring 2014.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/15/the-ends-of-capitalism
By Rob Urie
Counter Punch
November 17, 2013
In the midst of the unfolding economic and financial catastrophes
of 2009 Barack Obama, the new President of the U.S., entered
office with the broad political support needed to lead the
country away from the war, militarism, and economic pillage of
the George W. Bush years.
The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had left those countries
in ruins with over a million Iraqis killed and four or more million
displaced.
In contrast to the outcomes imagined in the deluded hubris of
neo-con ‘think tanks,’ these wars demonstrated both the limits
of American military power as means of geopolitical suasion and
the absolute moral bankruptcy of America’s ‘leadership’ class
from the Bush/Cheney ‘team’ all the way down to the local flag
merchants.
The economic calamity underway was the broadest and deepest
since the Great Depression and shared that human-economic
catastrophe’s genesis in runaway finance and its result in a
socially untenable and politically incapacitating divide between
rich and poor.
The ‘world’ Mr. Obama inherited wasn’t ‘working’ for large
majorities in the West.
The level of employment of the working age population had
begun declining in 2000 and it had fallen off of the proverbial
cliff by late 2008.
The illusion of prosperity in some evidence in the mid-2000s
courtesy of the monetization of the preponderance of U.S.
housing equity, the collective savings of home ‘owners,’ to
fund purchases of wide screen televisions, 3rd, 4th, and 5th
automobiles, and new porch furniture, had shown its
foundations in mass delusion.
On Wall Street the gig was up, the financial ‘system’ was in full
collapse from the weight of its own ‘bounty’ and only had left its
brethren in financial ‘innovation’ to plunder.
The economic ‘efficiencies’ of thirty years of pirate capitalism
had shown themselves in the pockets and bank accounts of
America’s few hundred richest families and in its residual,
the smoldering ruins of an economy that had once made things,
for better and/or for worse, as well as in the emergent ‘micro’
economy of the formerly employed trading piece work and stock
tips on the Internet to keep the foreclosure wolves at bay.
In theory and in human capacity Mr. Obama had ‘options’ outside
dedicated restoration of the system of political economy that had
been so recently repudiated through his very own election and
through its own emergent facts.
Mr. Obama’s artifacts of American social ontology, ‘black,’
‘liberal,’ ‘thoughtful,’ were/are in theorized opposition
to the beloved/reviled baby Bush whose ‘aw shucks’ isms
were/are the coded populism of the business class in Atlanta,
Houston and of the rapidly expanding sputtering pissed right.
Rendered invisible in the public politicking was that Messrs.
Obama and Bush went to the same schools, ate at the same
restaurants with the same corporate representatives and
saw/see their interests as deeply tied to the existing order.
To the extent human agency ‘is,’ history will deal with each
man for the social space they occupied.
And that social space includes embodying the ‘hopes and
aspirations,’ however implausibly, of the people they only
encounter in passing on their way to or from meetings, lunches,
golf outings with their ‘peers’ whose competence at traversing
the social divide for long enough to bring back the bounty has
been demonstrated.
For those to whom this ‘embodiment’ is important, its motorcade
just drove past you on its way to a bankers convention in Geneva,
a United War Profiteers of America ski outing in Jackson Hole or
the annual Drone Murder and Torture shindig in San Diego.
However, and with apologies in advance for being the bearer of bad
news, as metaphor the ‘rollout,’ such as the term is operationally
applicable, of Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act is rough measure of
where you stand in the order of things.
In clear contrast, no systems other than the one that mattered
capitalism, crashed in 2009.
According to the income distribution data the restoration of banker
bonuses, executive pay, and the gaping chasm between the
beneficiaries of ‘free-market’ corporate welfare and its victims,
went off without a hitch.
There were no reports of J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon or
Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein having trouble logging on
to savethebankers.gov.
No doubt it is easier to transfer a few trillion dollars to a few
hundred families than it is to support and maintain the most
radically dysfunctional health care system in the ‘developed’
world, but don’t they teach technocratic competence at Harvard?
While all this is now just so much water over the windmill or
some such, the system that crashed in 1990, 2000 and again
in 2008 is still the one ‘we’ have.
And its reach into the world that we, the ‘driven by,’ live in
increases with every passing calamity
There was speculation when Mr. Obama appointed the primary
Clinton administration architects of the 2008 financial economic
catastrophe, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, to key
positions in his administration that he was doing so because
they knew ‘where the bodies were buried.’
Left unconsidered was that the practical, actual, factual effect
of the then unfolding calamity on the ‘people who matter’ was
their being forced to listen to annoying talking points on cable
business shows and having to forego a few moments of moving
and shaking to transfer their financial ‘assets’ of ill repute onto
the public accounts.
It wasn’t that different paths forward were considered and
decided against; they never entered the decision making
process.
There are points of dispute here, enthusiastic ‘debate’ was
reportedly held inside the Obama administration around the
questions: should Citibank and Bank of America be ‘nationalized,’
should Wall Street be ‘reined in’ through re-regulation and most
fundamentally, should the ‘stimulus package’ have been larger.
Of relevance is that the institutional prerogative of the politically
‘feasible’ was the unifying characteristic of all of these ‘debate’
resolutions.
But to be clear, this realm that of the politically feasible, is
utterly unrelated to the circumstance of the ‘driven by’ it is
coded reference to the politically, economically embedded,
in no way to be confused with the ‘hopes and aspirations’
‘embodied.’
The saying is that Mr. Obama inherited difficult circumstances
when he came into office.
But what he inherited was a particular stage in an historical
trajectory, one of what are regularly recurring crises in the
ascendance of global capitalism.
Within this trajectory catastrophes such as that of 2009 are
as much a part of political economy as the times of ‘prosperity.’
The view from the ‘inside’ from Washington and Wall Street,
averages prosperity with catastrophe to come to an ‘average’
conclusion about the political-economic viability of this capitalism.
Mr. Obama, or any other successful politician within the modern
understanding of success, ‘embodies’ the hopes and aspirations
of ‘average’ Americans in the same way that the average of
catastrophe and prosperity reach them in their lives.
Mr. Bush before him embodied the hopes and dreams of ‘long
suffering’ war mongering white, Christian Pentecostals and Mr.
Obama has his liberal progressive constituency, the average of
the two which form different ‘sides’ of an outside, the ‘driven
by.’
This isn’t to discount the difference, but rather to ask: who
exactly is making bank on it?
As circumscribed by those whose fortunes have been restored
since Mr. Obama took office, the difference that matters
remains between the embedded and the embodied, between
those whose fortunes are foregone conclusions and those who
wave as the motorcade passes.
The passions that surround Western political economy are
reactive for a reason.
Mr. Obama was assumed to represent antithesis because history
called for it.
The unmitigated disaster of the (baby) Bush years was evident to
even the dullest of his supporters as the incontrovertible ‘proof’
of calamity, falling stock prices, was underway.
But ‘change’ holds forth no promised direction. And more
fundamentally, from what possible logic would true antithesis
spring?
Within the static anti-historicism of capitalism antithesis always
and everywhere exists in the ‘driven by,’ in the ‘failure’ needed
to demonstrate the truth determining power of ‘success’ through
wealth and profits.
Restoration of the fortunes of the already rich was restoration
of this static antithesis, the only one visible to Mr. Obama’s
classmates.
The problem of re-thinking capitalism, not that anyone in the
recent history has tried, is that within its logic no catastrophe
is effective repudiation and outside of it either the whole project
goes into the garbage heap or none of it does.
A real catastrophe confronted the peoples of the West as
Mr. Obama entered office.
But the difference between having a billion dollars in the bank or
‘only’ five hundred million dollars was the problem that confronted
the people who brought Mr. Obama into office.
That problem calls for a different set of solutions than being cold,
hungry and unemployed.
And that is the problem Mr. Obama set about fixing.
Western economists view the sequential crises of 1990, 2000 and
2008 as unrelated events to be ‘solved’ through reactive responses,
through Keynesian stimulus or with ‘more’ capitalism.
However, within each subsequent economic ‘recovery’
the political economy of catastrophe grows.
The evidence of social dysfunction, radically skewed income
distribution, the increasingly sharp divide between those on
the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of political economy, political
incapacitation and a collective inability to solve even the
most basic social problems, is but the detritus of the thread
that carries these crises through ‘normal’ times.
In the terms of those moving comfortably along in the motorcade
there are ‘recessions’ and ‘recoveries,’ life’s facts whose average
may impact ‘the people’ differently, but only through the secular
god of capitalism’s discriminating hands.
The ‘driven by’ wave to themselves, to their ‘embodiment’ that
‘could have been them’ under some alternate order of the universe.
If ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are their own ‘proof’ of the efficacy of
capitalism as god’s hand in human affairs then so is its attendant
social dysfunction, if the rich are busy ‘making money’ and the
poor are their own ‘proof’ of their inability to be ‘successful’
then what conceivably could be the point of political reconciliation?
In choosing to ‘save’ the ‘system’ he so willingly entered, Mr.
Obama, like those before him, chose the sides inherent in that
system.
The government money used under Mr. Obama’s direction to buy
Wall Street’s garbage ‘assets’ was/is unified in its ‘moneyness’ with
that needed to salve the lot of the ‘driven by,’ those dispossessed
by birth, race, gender or more general circumstance, economic
class.
To paraphrase the cliché, ‘if you teach a man to borrow he eats
for a day, if you give the bank the money to lend to the man he
eats for a day and repays the borrowed money for a lifetime.’
Alternatively, and following from that theoretician of ‘system’
John Maynard Keynes, if you give people the money they need
to eat and live indoors they spend it and the system of
capitalism survives.
Given the choice, banks or their ‘customers,’ what system exactly,
precisely was it that Mr. Obama saved by choosing the banks?
In either case the system of capitalism would be ‘saved.’
To pretend for a moment that the question hasn’t already been
answered, why choose bankers, the ‘embedded,’ over ‘the people,’
those whose hopes and aspirations Messrs. Bush and Obama so
readily ‘embodied?’
The system to be so regularly saved is that of the perfectly ordered
universe, every man, woman and child in his or her God determined
‘place.’
How does one know their proper place?
Which side of the motorcade are you on?
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York. His book "Zen Economics" will be published by CounterPunch / AK Press in
Spring 2014.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/15/the-ends-of-capitalism
Friday, November 15, 2013
What's Going On
What's Going On
By Marvin Gaye
November 15, 2013
Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Picket lines and picket sign
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going
What's going on
What's going on
Right on
Right on
Right on
Mother, mother
Everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Come on talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
What's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you ya, what's going on
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whats-going-on-lyrics-
marvin-gaye.html
By Marvin Gaye
November 15, 2013
Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Picket lines and picket sign
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going
What's going on
What's going on
Right on
Right on
Right on
Mother, mother
Everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Come on talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
What's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you ya, what's going on
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whats-going-on-lyrics-
marvin-gaye.html
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
The Greatest Generation?
The Greatest Generation?
A Poem
By Francis A. Boyle
Counterpunch.org
November 12, 2013
The Greatest Generation?
Oh really?
If they were so great
Then why did they send
Their Sons so willingly
Off to die
In Vietnam
A war they started
While we suffered from
58,000 young men
Of my generation
Were murdered
By The Greatest Generation
Hundreds of Thousands
Of our Lives were destroyed
Plus 3 million genocided Vietnamese
Not that “gooks” mattered to The Greatest Generation
Then neither did we their Sons
Why didn’t The Greatest Generation
Rise up as One
And tell the American Empire
That you will not have our Sons
Over our dead bodies!
Hell no!
They will not go!
Why did The Greatest Generation
Not fight for US their Sons
Against the American Empire
As they did against the German and Japanese Empires
We the Sons of the Greatest Generation were not worth it
They said they were liberating Peoples in Foreign Lands
Then why did The Greatest Generation send their Sons
To fight and die
In that God-forsaken Land?
And to murder millions living in their own Land?
Was this some blood-sport
we had to play
With them as pony riders
and US as buzkashi goat carcasses
Was it reverse Freudian Oedipal Complex
Them killing us off
before we got to them
And took their place
Were we blood-sacrifice to Moloch
With them as Priests
And we as sacrificial lambs
Were we their Abrahams
Actually murdering US their Isaacs
In a Holocaust
To their Genocidal Yahweh
Hard to say
What was going on
In the Minds of The Greatest Generation
If anything at all
Mindless Patriotism
The last refuge of them Scoundrels!
They knew all about War
then sent their Sons marching off
Into the Valley of Death
Charge of the Light Brigade
The result was predictable
A Decimated Generation
A Shattered Generation
MY GENERATION!
BUT WE ENDED THEIR DAMN WAR!
The Greatest Generation?
Hell no!
A Pathetic Generation!
May they ever be tormented
By Their Own Son’s Souls
Francis Anthony Boyle is a professor of international law
at the University of Illinois College of Law.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/11/the-greatest
-generation-2
A Poem
By Francis A. Boyle
Counterpunch.org
November 12, 2013
The Greatest Generation?
Oh really?
If they were so great
Then why did they send
Their Sons so willingly
Off to die
In Vietnam
A war they started
While we suffered from
58,000 young men
Of my generation
Were murdered
By The Greatest Generation
Hundreds of Thousands
Of our Lives were destroyed
Plus 3 million genocided Vietnamese
Not that “gooks” mattered to The Greatest Generation
Then neither did we their Sons
Why didn’t The Greatest Generation
Rise up as One
And tell the American Empire
That you will not have our Sons
Over our dead bodies!
Hell no!
They will not go!
Why did The Greatest Generation
Not fight for US their Sons
Against the American Empire
As they did against the German and Japanese Empires
We the Sons of the Greatest Generation were not worth it
They said they were liberating Peoples in Foreign Lands
Then why did The Greatest Generation send their Sons
To fight and die
In that God-forsaken Land?
And to murder millions living in their own Land?
Was this some blood-sport
we had to play
With them as pony riders
and US as buzkashi goat carcasses
Was it reverse Freudian Oedipal Complex
Them killing us off
before we got to them
And took their place
Were we blood-sacrifice to Moloch
With them as Priests
And we as sacrificial lambs
Were we their Abrahams
Actually murdering US their Isaacs
In a Holocaust
To their Genocidal Yahweh
Hard to say
What was going on
In the Minds of The Greatest Generation
If anything at all
Mindless Patriotism
The last refuge of them Scoundrels!
They knew all about War
then sent their Sons marching off
Into the Valley of Death
Charge of the Light Brigade
The result was predictable
A Decimated Generation
A Shattered Generation
MY GENERATION!
BUT WE ENDED THEIR DAMN WAR!
The Greatest Generation?
Hell no!
A Pathetic Generation!
May they ever be tormented
By Their Own Son’s Souls
Francis Anthony Boyle is a professor of international law
at the University of Illinois College of Law.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/11/the-greatest
-generation-2
Thursday, November 7, 2013
The Long Terror
Russell Brand and the Need for Planetary Adjustment
By Elliot Sperber
Information Clearing House
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Russell Brand’s recent political essay, viral BBC interview, and
ongoing comedy tour – The Messiah Complex – raise important
political and philosophical questions concerning, among other
issues, the nature of justice, the importance of voting, and the
need for radical, revolutionary change.
These deserve serious consideration.
Since at least the time of the Athenian statesman Solon (c. 638 BC
– 558 BC), whose reforms are credited with setting the historical
stage for the emergence of democracy in ancient Athens, the
concept of law has contained a crucial ambiguity.
While the law is rightfully recognized as an instrument of Order –
legitimizing and maintaining a status quo – it is not restricted to
this function.
Beyond this conservative function is its more vital dimension.
In addition to its retentive, conservative aspect, Law has a
protentive, metamorphic aspect.
Law may even be likened, in this respect, to DNA; it not only
clones, it mutates.
For, along with maintaining Order, law (or, the spirit of the law)
is also employed in pursuing that which disrupts Order (that is,
Justice).
This latter, law-nullifying aspect of Law is what allowed Solon
to not only nullify the law of Draco – abolishing people’s debts,
freeing debt-slaves, and constraining the power of Athens’ ancient
oligarchy, according to Plutarch – but enabled a relatively
egalitarian redistribution of the social world of the ancient
Athenians as well.
And while it is important to note that this egalitarianism did
not extend to women, slaves, and other excluded people, and
so exposes the limitations of Athenian democracy, it does not
diminish this emancipatory aspect of the law.
In many respects, law – as such – is constituted by this very
contradiction.
Unstable, it is forever adjusting (a term which, by the way,
literally means toward the just).
Unlike the dead letter of the law that Order appeals to for support
and legitimacy, Justice, the spirit of the law, is the living, vital
aspect of the law – the truth of the law as opposed to its mere
semblance.
Among other things, this ambiguity of the law has a corollary in
the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s concept
of the political.
According to Ranciere, like law, the political has two dimensions.
On one hand it is the maintenance of Order – what he terms politics
as police.
On the other hand, corresponding to justice, is actual politics.
Actual politics disrupts the Order maintained by the politics as police.
As he defines it in his Disagreement, actual politics only arises when
“the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of
a part of those who have no part” (11).
That is, politics proper only emerges with this disruption of Order
by this striving toward an egalitarian redistribution of the social
sphere – the adjustment toward the Just.
It is in this context that we should situate Russell Brand’s recent
statements concerning politics and justice in general, and voting
in particular.
While many have criticized and mocked Brand for dismissing the
practice of voting, it is paramount to recognize (that is, to cognize
and to re-cognize) that, according to Ranciere’s formulation, of
itself voting is not necessarily a political act at all.
In general it is a function of politics as police – the maintenance
of Order.
Indeed, insofar as it signals one’s consent to be governed, voting
is a largely acclamatory gesture – applauding a particular character
in what is political theater more than actual politics.
While voting is intrinsically problematic, however, this does not
mean that it is necessarily or essentially anti-political in Ranciere’s
sense.
In theory, one could acclaim (and go beyond acclamation) an
entirely new type of distribution of the world – a distribution
of the world according to egalitarian priorities.
Instead of the priorities and rules of the inertial Order busy
dividing and conquering and distributing and consuming and
desecrating the world, in theory voting could acclaim a Just
distribution of the world – one that subordinates the dictates
of profit to the actual well-being of the people and the
environment – an adjustment that does not stabilize into some
new inertial Order, but rather is stable only insofar as it
continues to adjust.
Needless to say, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party,
among the other institutions that represent and manifest the
interests of the present Order, are existentially hostile to any
meaningful adjustment; for such would involve a significant
redistribution of the cultural and physical wealth of the world,
produced thus far by humanity as a whole, from their control.
In other words, in spite of all the sanctimonious blather regarding
Democracy, no such thing exists.
In this so-called “representative democracy” a very narrow slice
of “interests” is in fact represented.
And politics in any meaningful sense is in part dream, in part
delusion.
Contrary to the repeated assertions of Jeremy Paxman, Russell
Brand’s interlocutor, as well as countless others, we do not live
in a democracy.
We in fact live in a political arrangement more properly described
as a plutocracy.
Ploutos (wealth), not the demos (the people), is in charge.
While this claim may not jibe with the hegemonic doxa, it is a
matter of simple observation that one cannot even participate
in a non-marginalized manner in the political theater unless one
is backed – supported – by the rich.
Before votes are ever counted, money determines the outcomes
of elections.
It acts as a gatekeeper.
Excluded from ballots, and debates, third party candidates with
millions of supporters are effectively barred from participating.
Millions of supporters matter less than millions of dollars.
Unless backed by the rich one cannot compete in campaigns that
cost fortunes.
And once in office, the constant need to raise funds ensures that
those who deviate from the desires of the rich are cut off, and cut
out.
This is not to say that a sufficiently popular political and social
movement could not overcome these barriers.
It is placing the proverbial cart before the horse, however, to
suppose that such support could be achieved by the ballot.
In order to overcome the institutional barriers to the political
stage, a person – or group, or party – would have to possess an
enormous amount of popular support in the first place.
And even if some hypothetical candidate prevailed in some
contest for some office, unless enough like-minded people
occupied comparable positions, very little could be accomplished.
To meaningfully change the design of the existing Order, the laws
that function to maintain the Order and preclude the Just need to
be changed or dissolved.
All of which is to say, if a social movement were large enough to
allow for an actual takeover of congress, such a movement would
already enjoy a degree of support sufficient to force congress to
step down without having to step into congress’ shoes – those shoes
of the old Order – in the first place.
If, for example, a political movement enjoyed enough popular
support to change the constitution (to include such mild, though
necessary, alterations as a positive right to housing, education,
a guaranteed universal income, health care, debt forgiveness,
not to mention more radical, structural changes) – if such a
movement had a measure of popular support sufficient to overcome
the onerous hurdles placed before amending the constitution,
why even bother?
For the sake of tradition (i.e., the old Order)? Why not just write
a new constitution altogether?
Perhaps this is what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he reputedly
said that he would not change a jot of law.
Rather than changing the law of Order, he would leave it to rot.
The actual law, the law of justice, is a different matter.
Notwithstanding the above, and in spite of the fact that it
has received so much attention, it is important to consider
the fact that Russell Brand’s main point was not “don’t vote.”
In his New Statesman essay, and in his BBC interview with
Jeremy Paxman, Brand’s position vis-a-vis voting was ancillary
to his main argument: political change must be preceded by
a change of consciousness; before an actual politics can even
arise a recognition of not only the pure arbitrariness of
the existing Order, but its concrete harmfulness and injustice,
needs to take place.
People must see the cold hard fact that poverty and profit
– the infernal conditions of the slums of Kibera, outside
Nairobi, not to mention the slums of the Bronx, and the
decadent excess of plutocratic luxury – are two sides of the
same coin.
Each creates, and recreates, the other.
Just as profit is not generated without a corresponding loss
somewhere, wealth creates poverty and vice versa.
Beyond the horrors inflicted by the inertial Order on billions
throughout the world, there is also the fact that, in a world
with finite resources, it is patently self-destructive to maintain
a political-economy based on waste and exploitation.
The net result of our collective work, our “economic production,”
is a world that is being steadily deformed into toxic refuse.
And, contrary to the reigning ideology, it does not have to be
this way.
Existing conditions are neither natural nor inevitable.
Slums, poverty, war, third world as well as first world indentured
servitude – these things are made by people, and as such can be
unmade by people.
Among the many reactions to Brand’s argument for revolutionary
change, a particularly pervasive one is that revolutions are
dangerous and reap more harm than good.
In advocating radical change, these people maintain,
Russell Brand is little more than a dangerous fool.
For example, in Russell Brand: Good Pundit, Bad Thinker,
Parker Brown argues in The Atlantic that revolutions are
generally accompanied by terrors, and that these terrors
tend to leave people worse off.
Citing multiple horrors, Brown argues that radical change is too
dangerous to seriously consider. Best to forego such radicality.
Aside from the esteemed historian Arno Mayer’s findings in The
Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
that, more often than not, the resistance to revolutionary change
is what heightens violence, contrary to Brown’s contention, many
revolutions do not experience any terror phase at all.
Indeed, the US revolution is only one among many revolutions that
experienced no revolutionary terror.
Of course, one must not overlook the fact that after the US
Constitution was ratified, and the ongoing terror of slavery
was cemented into law (a body of law that also paved the way
for the systematic removal and annihilation of the continent’s
indigenous population), terror abounded.
From this perspective, “reign of terror” takes on a decidedly different meaning.
It is a gruesome irony that Brown raises starvation as a key example
of revolutionary harms, noting that during the Chinese Revolution
hunger was so severe that the exhumation and consumption of
corpses was widespread.
Because, while horrific levels of starvation did occur in China,
as well as in Stalin’s USSR, among other places, the spectacular
nature of eating corpses should not blind us to the fact that, as
these words are being written, extreme starvation is rampant
throughout much of the world today – and this is caused, in large
part, by the very neoliberal economic Order that people like Parker
Brown defend.
In Haiti, for instance, systemic famine is so severe that people
regularly resort to eating dirt.
And though malnutrition has been rising precipitously in Haiti in
the years following the massive 2010 earthquake, it remains less
severe than in Guatemala, and parts of Africa, among other places.
As Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, as bloody as the terror of the French Revolution, and
other revolutions’ terrors, may have been, there is another
terror whose horrors far surpass these.
Of these two types of terror, one, like that which sprouted from the
French Revolution, is short. Lasting months, it claims thousands of
lives.
The other type of terror is long. Lasting thousands of years, it
enslaves and brutalizes and reaps the lives of hundreds of millions.
While both of these terrors are anathema to justice, Twain raises
an urgent point – a point that is largely congruent with what Brand
refers to when he writes of his trip to the slums of Nairobi.
The long terror that Twain described is by no means over.
Neither anomalous, nor an aberration, it is necessarily produced
and reproduced along with the rest of our political-economy, and
inextricable from the present Order.
While Russell Brand is by no means perfect, and among other things
exhibits a considerable deal of disturbing behavior - rape jokes, and
other forms of sexism that both stem from patriarchal privilege,
and reproduce the existing patriarchal Order of domination – he is
nevertheless entirely correct in pointing out both the need for what
the ever-problematic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as
a “revaluation of all values,” and a radical deviation from the
present, ecocidal Order.
Though characterized as a sort of simpleton savant spouting the
need for violent change, rather than advocating violence, Russell
Brand may be more accurately characterized as agitating for the
recognition of the need for an end to what the philosopher Walter
Benjamin referred to as the systemic “law-preserving violence” of
the present violent Order.
Without raising him to the status of anything above a fellow fallible
human being, we ought to support Russell Brand’s call for replacing
the political-economy cannibalizing the planet with an actual politics.
While remaining critical of his shortcomings, and the power his
celebrity visibility wields, we nevertheless ought to encourage
and support the popularization of his call for a radically
egalitarian redistribution of the cultural and physical wealth of
the world.
Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and contributor to
hygiecracy.blogspot.com
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36754.htm
By Elliot Sperber
Information Clearing House
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Russell Brand’s recent political essay, viral BBC interview, and
ongoing comedy tour – The Messiah Complex – raise important
political and philosophical questions concerning, among other
issues, the nature of justice, the importance of voting, and the
need for radical, revolutionary change.
These deserve serious consideration.
Since at least the time of the Athenian statesman Solon (c. 638 BC
– 558 BC), whose reforms are credited with setting the historical
stage for the emergence of democracy in ancient Athens, the
concept of law has contained a crucial ambiguity.
While the law is rightfully recognized as an instrument of Order –
legitimizing and maintaining a status quo – it is not restricted to
this function.
Beyond this conservative function is its more vital dimension.
In addition to its retentive, conservative aspect, Law has a
protentive, metamorphic aspect.
Law may even be likened, in this respect, to DNA; it not only
clones, it mutates.
For, along with maintaining Order, law (or, the spirit of the law)
is also employed in pursuing that which disrupts Order (that is,
Justice).
This latter, law-nullifying aspect of Law is what allowed Solon
to not only nullify the law of Draco – abolishing people’s debts,
freeing debt-slaves, and constraining the power of Athens’ ancient
oligarchy, according to Plutarch – but enabled a relatively
egalitarian redistribution of the social world of the ancient
Athenians as well.
And while it is important to note that this egalitarianism did
not extend to women, slaves, and other excluded people, and
so exposes the limitations of Athenian democracy, it does not
diminish this emancipatory aspect of the law.
In many respects, law – as such – is constituted by this very
contradiction.
Unstable, it is forever adjusting (a term which, by the way,
literally means toward the just).
Unlike the dead letter of the law that Order appeals to for support
and legitimacy, Justice, the spirit of the law, is the living, vital
aspect of the law – the truth of the law as opposed to its mere
semblance.
Among other things, this ambiguity of the law has a corollary in
the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s concept
of the political.
According to Ranciere, like law, the political has two dimensions.
On one hand it is the maintenance of Order – what he terms politics
as police.
On the other hand, corresponding to justice, is actual politics.
Actual politics disrupts the Order maintained by the politics as police.
As he defines it in his Disagreement, actual politics only arises when
“the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of
a part of those who have no part” (11).
That is, politics proper only emerges with this disruption of Order
by this striving toward an egalitarian redistribution of the social
sphere – the adjustment toward the Just.
It is in this context that we should situate Russell Brand’s recent
statements concerning politics and justice in general, and voting
in particular.
While many have criticized and mocked Brand for dismissing the
practice of voting, it is paramount to recognize (that is, to cognize
and to re-cognize) that, according to Ranciere’s formulation, of
itself voting is not necessarily a political act at all.
In general it is a function of politics as police – the maintenance
of Order.
Indeed, insofar as it signals one’s consent to be governed, voting
is a largely acclamatory gesture – applauding a particular character
in what is political theater more than actual politics.
While voting is intrinsically problematic, however, this does not
mean that it is necessarily or essentially anti-political in Ranciere’s
sense.
In theory, one could acclaim (and go beyond acclamation) an
entirely new type of distribution of the world – a distribution
of the world according to egalitarian priorities.
Instead of the priorities and rules of the inertial Order busy
dividing and conquering and distributing and consuming and
desecrating the world, in theory voting could acclaim a Just
distribution of the world – one that subordinates the dictates
of profit to the actual well-being of the people and the
environment – an adjustment that does not stabilize into some
new inertial Order, but rather is stable only insofar as it
continues to adjust.
Needless to say, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party,
among the other institutions that represent and manifest the
interests of the present Order, are existentially hostile to any
meaningful adjustment; for such would involve a significant
redistribution of the cultural and physical wealth of the world,
produced thus far by humanity as a whole, from their control.
In other words, in spite of all the sanctimonious blather regarding
Democracy, no such thing exists.
In this so-called “representative democracy” a very narrow slice
of “interests” is in fact represented.
And politics in any meaningful sense is in part dream, in part
delusion.
Contrary to the repeated assertions of Jeremy Paxman, Russell
Brand’s interlocutor, as well as countless others, we do not live
in a democracy.
We in fact live in a political arrangement more properly described
as a plutocracy.
Ploutos (wealth), not the demos (the people), is in charge.
While this claim may not jibe with the hegemonic doxa, it is a
matter of simple observation that one cannot even participate
in a non-marginalized manner in the political theater unless one
is backed – supported – by the rich.
Before votes are ever counted, money determines the outcomes
of elections.
It acts as a gatekeeper.
Excluded from ballots, and debates, third party candidates with
millions of supporters are effectively barred from participating.
Millions of supporters matter less than millions of dollars.
Unless backed by the rich one cannot compete in campaigns that
cost fortunes.
And once in office, the constant need to raise funds ensures that
those who deviate from the desires of the rich are cut off, and cut
out.
This is not to say that a sufficiently popular political and social
movement could not overcome these barriers.
It is placing the proverbial cart before the horse, however, to
suppose that such support could be achieved by the ballot.
In order to overcome the institutional barriers to the political
stage, a person – or group, or party – would have to possess an
enormous amount of popular support in the first place.
And even if some hypothetical candidate prevailed in some
contest for some office, unless enough like-minded people
occupied comparable positions, very little could be accomplished.
To meaningfully change the design of the existing Order, the laws
that function to maintain the Order and preclude the Just need to
be changed or dissolved.
All of which is to say, if a social movement were large enough to
allow for an actual takeover of congress, such a movement would
already enjoy a degree of support sufficient to force congress to
step down without having to step into congress’ shoes – those shoes
of the old Order – in the first place.
If, for example, a political movement enjoyed enough popular
support to change the constitution (to include such mild, though
necessary, alterations as a positive right to housing, education,
a guaranteed universal income, health care, debt forgiveness,
not to mention more radical, structural changes) – if such a
movement had a measure of popular support sufficient to overcome
the onerous hurdles placed before amending the constitution,
why even bother?
For the sake of tradition (i.e., the old Order)? Why not just write
a new constitution altogether?
Perhaps this is what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he reputedly
said that he would not change a jot of law.
Rather than changing the law of Order, he would leave it to rot.
The actual law, the law of justice, is a different matter.
Notwithstanding the above, and in spite of the fact that it
has received so much attention, it is important to consider
the fact that Russell Brand’s main point was not “don’t vote.”
In his New Statesman essay, and in his BBC interview with
Jeremy Paxman, Brand’s position vis-a-vis voting was ancillary
to his main argument: political change must be preceded by
a change of consciousness; before an actual politics can even
arise a recognition of not only the pure arbitrariness of
the existing Order, but its concrete harmfulness and injustice,
needs to take place.
People must see the cold hard fact that poverty and profit
– the infernal conditions of the slums of Kibera, outside
Nairobi, not to mention the slums of the Bronx, and the
decadent excess of plutocratic luxury – are two sides of the
same coin.
Each creates, and recreates, the other.
Just as profit is not generated without a corresponding loss
somewhere, wealth creates poverty and vice versa.
Beyond the horrors inflicted by the inertial Order on billions
throughout the world, there is also the fact that, in a world
with finite resources, it is patently self-destructive to maintain
a political-economy based on waste and exploitation.
The net result of our collective work, our “economic production,”
is a world that is being steadily deformed into toxic refuse.
And, contrary to the reigning ideology, it does not have to be
this way.
Existing conditions are neither natural nor inevitable.
Slums, poverty, war, third world as well as first world indentured
servitude – these things are made by people, and as such can be
unmade by people.
Among the many reactions to Brand’s argument for revolutionary
change, a particularly pervasive one is that revolutions are
dangerous and reap more harm than good.
In advocating radical change, these people maintain,
Russell Brand is little more than a dangerous fool.
For example, in Russell Brand: Good Pundit, Bad Thinker,
Parker Brown argues in The Atlantic that revolutions are
generally accompanied by terrors, and that these terrors
tend to leave people worse off.
Citing multiple horrors, Brown argues that radical change is too
dangerous to seriously consider. Best to forego such radicality.
Aside from the esteemed historian Arno Mayer’s findings in The
Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
that, more often than not, the resistance to revolutionary change
is what heightens violence, contrary to Brown’s contention, many
revolutions do not experience any terror phase at all.
Indeed, the US revolution is only one among many revolutions that
experienced no revolutionary terror.
Of course, one must not overlook the fact that after the US
Constitution was ratified, and the ongoing terror of slavery
was cemented into law (a body of law that also paved the way
for the systematic removal and annihilation of the continent’s
indigenous population), terror abounded.
From this perspective, “reign of terror” takes on a decidedly different meaning.
It is a gruesome irony that Brown raises starvation as a key example
of revolutionary harms, noting that during the Chinese Revolution
hunger was so severe that the exhumation and consumption of
corpses was widespread.
Because, while horrific levels of starvation did occur in China,
as well as in Stalin’s USSR, among other places, the spectacular
nature of eating corpses should not blind us to the fact that, as
these words are being written, extreme starvation is rampant
throughout much of the world today – and this is caused, in large
part, by the very neoliberal economic Order that people like Parker
Brown defend.
In Haiti, for instance, systemic famine is so severe that people
regularly resort to eating dirt.
And though malnutrition has been rising precipitously in Haiti in
the years following the massive 2010 earthquake, it remains less
severe than in Guatemala, and parts of Africa, among other places.
As Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, as bloody as the terror of the French Revolution, and
other revolutions’ terrors, may have been, there is another
terror whose horrors far surpass these.
Of these two types of terror, one, like that which sprouted from the
French Revolution, is short. Lasting months, it claims thousands of
lives.
The other type of terror is long. Lasting thousands of years, it
enslaves and brutalizes and reaps the lives of hundreds of millions.
While both of these terrors are anathema to justice, Twain raises
an urgent point – a point that is largely congruent with what Brand
refers to when he writes of his trip to the slums of Nairobi.
The long terror that Twain described is by no means over.
Neither anomalous, nor an aberration, it is necessarily produced
and reproduced along with the rest of our political-economy, and
inextricable from the present Order.
While Russell Brand is by no means perfect, and among other things
exhibits a considerable deal of disturbing behavior - rape jokes, and
other forms of sexism that both stem from patriarchal privilege,
and reproduce the existing patriarchal Order of domination – he is
nevertheless entirely correct in pointing out both the need for what
the ever-problematic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as
a “revaluation of all values,” and a radical deviation from the
present, ecocidal Order.
Though characterized as a sort of simpleton savant spouting the
need for violent change, rather than advocating violence, Russell
Brand may be more accurately characterized as agitating for the
recognition of the need for an end to what the philosopher Walter
Benjamin referred to as the systemic “law-preserving violence” of
the present violent Order.
Without raising him to the status of anything above a fellow fallible
human being, we ought to support Russell Brand’s call for replacing
the political-economy cannibalizing the planet with an actual politics.
While remaining critical of his shortcomings, and the power his
celebrity visibility wields, we nevertheless ought to encourage
and support the popularization of his call for a radically
egalitarian redistribution of the cultural and physical wealth of
the world.
Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and contributor to
hygiecracy.blogspot.com
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36754.htm
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